Archive for June, 2008
Two Web-Based Tools to Assist in Optimizing Web Page Load Times
Pingdom’s full page test will tell you exactly how long it takes to load a given web page and is various sub-elements.
Website Optimzation’s Web Page Analyzer gives detailed information about the size, etc. of every object that is being loaded when a given web page is accessed along with other details (it notified me, for example, that I’d forgotten to turn compression on).
I’d Hit That
Nice Nintendo-themed t-shirt from 80sTees.Com
Tags: Nintendo, Super Mario, T-Shirt
Enterzon - The MMO for Learning Mandarin Chinese
Enterzon is a free, web-based MMO that is specifically design to teach Mandarin Chinese. Developed and hosted at Michigan State University, the idea is to engage players in the game and thereby encourage more natural learning of Mandarin Chinese,
on is a multiplayer, online learning environment designed to teach Chinese language and culture through gameplay. As a web-based site, Zon provides real-time, on-demand connection to interactive learning activities and authentic cultural information. Zon players are motivated not only by their intrinsic desire to learn more about Chinese language and culture, but also the ability to interact with engaging story-driven plot lines, interesting characters, and fellow players. Zon is built on the premise that learning is interactive. The game provides the opportunity for players to learn from non-player characters (NPCs), responsive game agents, and other players. Throughout each scene, players can engage with various elements of the environment, but they can also speak with other players in that scene or elsewhere in Zon. This allows for players to learn from both the designed game elements and other players. In this way, Zon is designed to provide social and environmental scaffolds to support player learning.
Linux Screen Capture/Casting Options
LinuxHaxor.Net has a nice article on a number of different methods to do screen capture/casting in Linux.
Tags: Linux, Screen Casting
Secular Coalition for America on That Pew Religion Poll
The other day I noted a Pew poll where 1 in 5 self-identified atheists said they also believed in God, and likened it to similar number of vegetarians who say they occasionally eat red meat — these folks aren’t atheists or vegetarians, but rather clueless. Anyway, the Secular Coalition for America has a slightly different interpretation. This isn’t cluelessness, they claim, it is an example of the fear people have in contemporary America to admit they don’t believe in God,
“When atheists are telling you they believe in God and Catholics are admitting they don’t, that’s evidence of the stigma our society puts on nontheists,” said Lori Lipman Brown, Director of the Secular Coalition for America. “Americans repeatedly tell pollsters that an atheist is the last person they’d want their children to marry, the last person they’d vote for as President. This prejudice also appears in the widespread impression that atheists lack ethics and values.”
Atheists afraid to admit they believe in God? Give me a break. In fact, I think one of the reasons many Americans have such negative views of atheists is that a good proportion tend to want to talk about their irreligious views exclusively and incessantly (see, for example, Michael Newdow).
Just look at popular culture for goodness sake — the objects of ridicule and prejudice in movies, television shows and news broadcasts are the evangelical Christians (and often, frankly, for very good reason). For example, I just watched HBO’s Friends of God documentary for the third time. There is a Christian comedian featured in the documentary who complains, rightly I think, that evangelical Christians are one of the last groups that you can openly make fun of. And, of course, the entire point of the documentary itself seems less to understand Evangelicals than to simply make fun of them (which is hard not to do when you see adults singing ridiculous “Behemoth Was a Dinosaur” songs to convince children of the inerrancy of the Bible visa vis evolution).
If anyone had reason to conceal their true views for fear of ridicule it would be evangelical Christians, and yet they are hardly shrinking violets. If there are a bunch of secret, scared atheists, I suspect that says more about those individuals than it says for any lack of tolerance of atheism in America.
Tags: Atheism, Christianity, Religion, Secular Coalition for America, The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life
Photos from Tokyo Toy Show 2008
Boing! Boing! Gadgets recently pointed out this gallery of photographs from the Tokyo Toy Show 2008, including this amazing gaint Ultraman made from smaller Ultraman figures,
Makes me want to hum the Ultraman theme song.
Tags: Action Figures, Kaiju, Tokyo Toy Show 2008, Toys, Ultraman
DigMyPics.Com vs. ScanCafe.Com
Like a lot of people, I have thousands of photographs preserved on 35mm slides and negatives that I’ve really wanted to get scanned. There are a lot of companies that will do that for you, but the two leaders in that area are DigMyPics and ScanCafe . . . two companies that have often had a contentious relationship, to say the least.
After ScanCafe.Com became popular a year or so ago, based on undercutting DigMyPics pricing, DigMyPics started a campaign to highlight the fact that ScanCafe was shipping photos to India for scanning. For example, on its website DigMyPics had this helpful FAQ entry,
Will the work be done in the USA?
Some companies quietly your photos to a foreign country to have the work performed to increase their profit. For instance, one company in Miami will ship your photos to Costa Rica and another in California will ship them to India to have the scanning done even though these companies never mention those facts on their websites or they give the information in carefully chosen language and bury it in far less prominent places than their pricing.**
Nothing against Costa Rica or India, but I wouldn’t want my photos shipped there by a third party and out of my control.
While outsourcing to another country may make sense with high volume, low margin manufactured goods, it hasn’t worked so well with services. Irrespective of the clear risks involved with sending your photos to a third world country, it’s quite clear that dealing with the company’s employees who are working on your project in your language and culture produces a much more efficient and gratifying end user experience as well as a superior final product.
Rest assured that DigMyPics never ships your photos anywhere else and that all work is done right here in the USA by professional American photographers and artists.
Got that. India and/or Costa Rica are “risk[y] . . . third-world countries” where your photos are “out of my control.” Certainly you’d be much better sending your photos to a safe, American company (cue the Lee Greenwood music).
So last night, I was once again pondering whether to send my negatives off to be scanned and hit the DigMyPics site to see what their current pricing was. And this is what is currently on their front page,
DigMyPics.com
To our customers and friends,
On Monday May 5, 2008 at approximately 2am, Arizona Time, DigMyPics suffered a devastating fire which destroyed our building and most of its contents. The fire was large and the neighboring city of Mesa was called in to help fight it. Three large ladder trucks were used to douse the flames. Despite the best efforts of both city’s firefighters, the building was completely destroyed. Our website, email, customer database, and telephone lines are all currently down as a result.
As you can imagine, Annette and I are heartbroken by what has happened. We always believed that our customers placed their trust in us when they sent us their photos and videos and we took that responsibility personally and extremely seriously.
Annette, the employees of DigMyPics, and I are all still in shock and disbelief and we aren’t sure if we’ll even try to rebuild the company. What we are sure of is that we want to help those people that had put their trust in us to retrieve whatever is retrievable. We’re putting together a restoration team to help us restore whatever is uncovered. The Gilbert Fire Department has been extremely helpful to us and are sensitive to what we had in the building. They’re working hard to help us find and extract our customer’s photos and videos. The scene is currently under their custody as they investigate the fire’s cause but today we delivered a trailer to them and they’ve agreed to put any photos, film, hard drives or computers that they find in that trailer and give us access to it twice a day. We’ll take the material to another site we’ve temporarily leased to begin work on salvaging any images or videos that can be saved.
I don’t want to give any false hope, some people may have lost everything, but we had some encouraging news today. The fire department was able to successfully retrieve our servers and their forensic team has told us that the servers look good and that the data is likely retrievable. We store a copy of the images that have been completed on some of those servers. The building is completely destroyed but the roof collapse may have sheltered some areas from the worst effects. Fire crews are removing pieces of the roof and have found some photos and reels in tact.
Ouch.
Tags: Digital Photography, DigMyPics, India, ScanCafe, United States
Lego Is Full of Win
Roo Reynolds’ 3 minute presentation on Lego is one of the best presentations I’ve seen in quite awhile.
Tags: Legos, Roo Reynolds
Picnik Firefox Extension
The Picnik Firefox extension adds an “Edit in Picnik” menubar option in Firefox that makes it simple to import any graphic file into Picnik for editing. Very nice.
Tags: Digital Photography, Firefox, Picnik
Blizzard Announces a Physical Token for World of Warcraft Account Authentication
Theft of World of Warcraft accounts is a huge problem. The perception is that gold farmers are finding it much more lucrative to simply hack people’s accounts by tricking them into to installing keyloggers rather than actually use in-game bots to farm resources. There is an entire class of trojans now aimed largely at WoW players.
So Blizzard recently announced a forthcoming Authenticator product which looks to be a rebranded RSA SecurID. The device will costs $6.50 and asks the user to link the serial number of the device to the WoW account. From then on, when you want to log in you enter your username and password, then press a button on the Authenticator which generates a number that has to be entered as well. The number is essentially a rolling one time pad, and that specific number is only good for 30-60 seconds. So someone who manages to grab all three pieces of data has a very small window in which to gain access to your account.
As some have noted on WoW-related sites, this sort of scheme is still vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. Think of this being used to authenticate login to a bank website. I put my server in between you and the bank. You think your data is going to the bank, but its really going to my server, then I’m passing it on to the bank, and then passing the bank’s response on to you. You never even know you’ve been hacked until I log in with your password and ID later and clean out everything.
Assuming that the Authenticator is ever owned by a large percentage of users — and I’m skeptical it will be — it will be interesting to see if the hackers turn to man-in-the-middle style attacks or simply turn their attention to an easier target.
Tags: Blizzard, Privacy, Security, World of Warcraft